Hello and happy new year.
No problem with the informal tone, it’s fine.
Regarding this issue with images, there are indeed a few points to clarify.
The Gramps XML format, before becoming a robust backup format, was originally the internal database (Gramps 1.0 and earlier), and like the GEDCOM format, it stored paths to images, documents, videos, etc. Today, external storage—whether remote or in a dedicated directory—will encounter other issues. For example: